One of my favorite post-election action newsletters (which you should subscribe to if you're looking for actionable ways to resist the Trump agenda) covered the Milo Yiannopoulos/Simon & Schuster problem the other day. I suggest you read it if you're looking to take action: It give the address of where to send actual letters, which the activist suggests doing because actual letters make an impact in a way that emails can't. I'd also suggest that you direct these letters to the Threshold imprint.

The activist I'm linking to here does not support a boycott, and I'm inclined to agree, though halfheartedly. We are both Simon & Schuster authors, so please take that into account. I genuinely believe I'm ambivalent about a boycott for reasons having nothing to do with my own affiliation with S&S. (For the record: Unless "Face Value" unexpectedly and literally becomes a bestseller, I won't get any more money out of the company than what is promised to me in my contract. Most authors never earn back their advance and unless something drastically changes for me, I'm among that crowd.) I think boycotts can be effective. But they need to be strategic and organized for them to be so, and I just don't think that Simon & Schuster is the best target in this way. Not only because it's a fragile industry (though honestly, that too) or because they publish wonderful, often progressive, authors under different imprints (which they do, but that in and of itself is no reason to not boycott them) but because nobody gets into publishing to make money. They get into publishing because they love to read. They love books and ideas. This is one of those cases where writing a heartfelt letter actually might make a different for future buying decisions, particularly if there's a critical mass where the assistants opening the mail can make a case to their higher-ups for not publishing more white supremacists because it will simply be too much work.

So I suggest you write letters—physical letters, even if you've already sent an email—and then completely ignore it, though depending on how the book is received that tactic might need to change. No books are sold without publicity surrounding them, so let's do our best to not give this book publicity. It's tough because I very much feel a responsibility to speak out here, but I also know that I'm probably a part of the problem by doing exactly that. I've never been targeted by trolls on Twitter as much as I have been for my tweets on this topic. White supremacists love our outrage. That's not a reason to not be outraged! But it's a reminder to be strategic about it.

All that said, I'm not going to tell you to NOT boycott Simon & Schuster; if you choose to, please don't feel like you need to apologize to me for not buying my book. I'm still figuring out my own ways of how best to resist, and I support most endeavors to do just that, even if it's not a tactic I myself am engaging in.

Simon & Schuster announced that it will be publishing Dangerous, a book by Milo Yiannopoulos, an editor at Breitbart and a white supremacist, in March 2017 under its Threshold imprint, which is devoted to conservatism. As a Simon & Schuster author, I'm horrified that a company I've been proud to be associated with is giving a platform to Yiannopoulos.

To be clear, the book isn't about white supremacy. The book is about free speech, and indeed Yiannopoulos is well-situated to write about free speech. White supremacy has a history of making people rethink their commitment to free speech (I'm thinking here of Skokie, Illinois, a heavily Jewish town where Nazis were allowed to march and display the swastika in 1977, thanks in part to the ACLU's efforts to support the Nazis' First Amendment rights). I don't want to stop Yiannopoulos from writing or publishing such a book—or any book, for that matter, even as I find his views despicable. Free speech, even when it's abhorrent, is a cornerstone of democracy.

But the kind of "free speech" we're talking about here is the kind promised to us by our government, not the kind sold by for-profit companies like Simon & Schuster. Nobody has a right to a book deal; not publishing this book, even if it never once uses the phrase "white supremacy," is not censorship or an abridgement of free speech. Yiannopoulos already has quite a mouthpiece at his disposal; this isn't an issue of him not being able to assert his views.

The issue is that when a major publishing company gives a lucrative book deal to a white supremacist, it legitimizes him, even when the topic is free speech.

Indeed, that's his entire goal in publishing the book, not getting his word out per se: "this book is the moment Milo goes mainstream," Yiannopoulos told The Hollywood Reporter. By publishing this book, Simon & Schuster is enabling Yiannopoulos to "go mainstream," which normalizes his views and makes them seem like they should be a legitimate part of public discourse. It turns white supremacy into just another controversial viewpoint instead of a genuinely dangerous ideology that is gaining ground in our country by the minute. White supremacy kills people, and it will kill more people in the coming years.

This isn't about me just not liking what Yiannopoulos has to say; I don't like what most Threshold authors have to say. (Threshold exists to "provide a forum for the creative people, bedrock principles, and innovative ideas of contemporary conservatism.") But there is a sharp difference between conservative thinking and white supremacy. No publisher has an intellectual obligation to give a mouthpiece to the latter.

I've been thinking a good deal about boycotts and their effectiveness, and I'm not sure that calling for a boycott of all Simon & Schuster books is a great idea; I'm hesitant to say that you shouldn't buy good books that encourage clear thinking and open discourse—that seems counterproductive. But I will happily tell you that my book sales are far less important to me as a Simon & Schuster author than us taking a stand against legitimizing white supremacists. (I will also point out that the Face Value audiobook is not published by Simon & Schuster, ahem.) If you want to contact the publisher, you can call Threshold at 212.698.7006 or email at gallerypublicity@simonandschuster.com. I'll continue to think on how I want to handle this as an author with the same publisher, and am open to suggestions.

I have always believed that beauty is political. But when we are dealing with fascism sweeping our nation, the way for those of us who believe that is to use beauty in ways that support the work we have ahead of us. Put on your lipstick if it makes you fierce, then go out and yell. But right now I don’t have my usual intellectual luxury of examining beauty in the ways I usually do in this space.

I got an enormous shock in one of my core beliefs with this election. I have always believed, with the wide-eyed earnesty of a white woman for whom inclusion is usually taken for granted, in the sisterhood. I am horrified at how wrong I was about that. I’m shocked at my naive assumption that women would do better by one another; I’m shocked that 42 percent of women and 53 percent of white women looked at a man who is proud of his misogyny and think, Yes, him. Every woman who has ever been sexually assaulted was assaulted again on Tuesday night, including those who voted for him. Our national figurehead is a sexual assault trigger. I am sickened.

But the deeper rocking of my world has come from how this past week has made me look my own complicity right in the eye. I have long considered myself an ally to disenfranchised and oppressed people, but I now see that “considered myself” is meaningless. I have done jack shit to actually show up for people of color. I read the thinkpieces and make my Twitter feed diverse and try to treat people like they’re, you know, human, and none of that is active alliance. Patting myself on the back for being aware enough to not expect a cookie for being a decent human being is just me baking a batch of cookies for myself. I thought I “got” intersectional feminism because I agreed with its tenets. But I wasn’t really listening. I am sorry.

I’m a writer by nature and vocation, so part of how I wind up contributing to overcoming the fascism of this country might well be with my words. But right now, I don’t have anything to say that isn’t being said elsewhere by people whose voices more urgently need to be heard, and anyway, the kind of words I have to offer the world aren’t what we need right now. Right now, we need action, and organizing.

Here are a few places to start actionwise; these are roundups of specific, varied ways each of us can help overcome this. Find what works for you, then do it.

There is one thing about what’s going on that’s in my wheelhouse, so yes, let’s talk about safety pins. What the fuck are you thinking? We’re looking at the possibility of mass deportations and the impulse is to ask what you can wear to the revolution?

Maybe it’s different in communities where disenfranchised people are surrounded by the enemy—I don’t know, I can’t speak to that. But criminy, if you’re wearing a safety pin out of an earnest belief that someone in need can come to you, a stranger, because they need help? Then you, a stranger, can probably see that they need help, so help them regardless of what’s on your lapel.

People magazine tweeted today about the “bipartisan updo” Ivanka Trump sported at the second presidential debate. I guffawed, assuming it was a comment about the party affiliation of the hairstyle—it's an updo, so it's conservative! but it has tendrils, so it's liberal!It turns out neither tweet nor hairstyle had anything to do with ideology; the article the tweet linked to mentioned how Trump’s hairstylist for the night was a Democrat. But it did get me thinking: Is there any connection between political ideology and hairstyle? In fact, is there such a thing as a “bipartisan updo”?

Oddly, I couldn’t find any studies that looked at hairstyle and political leanings. Most of the studies on appearance and ideology are more focused on faces—a continuance of our fascination with physiognomy. That said, there's some evidence showing that some politicians, particularly Republicans, may benefit from simply looking Republican(what exactly that means was unclear, as I couldn’t access the full study, but I’m guessing that for male politicians—which the majority of Republican candidates are—it cross-references with masculine markers like a square jaw and prominent nose). So even if we leave aside entirely the question of whether our politics actually show up on our faces, it seems as though there’s evidence, however thin, showing that we have ideas of whether someone looks liberal or conservative, simply by their face. And that’s just our faces, which we have little control over. It only makes sense that we’d extend our judgment to hairstyles, since the wearer does have control over that aspect of appearance.

In the absence of studies I can’t really say what we as a culture think of as “Republican hair,” much less whether that actually holds true in how women style their hair. Looking at the hairstyles of various politicians, I’m not seeing any hard-and-fast rules about hairstyle, but by the time you’re a United States Senator you’ve probably had your hair focus-grouped to death, so I’m not putting much stock in that. But when you picture a Republican woman—particularly the moneyed, patrician sort, as opposed to the core of low-earning whites who make up the Trump base—chances are you picture quite a different woman than you do if asked to envision a Democrat. In fact, when I picture that sort of conservative voter, I do indeed picture a woman with an updo, perched high on the head, with no softening tendrils. She might also have a very neat bob, or an intricate set style of waves or curls, but the rich Republican woman in my mind’s eye doesn’t have a shaggy bob, hair longer than mid-back (particularly if she’s over 40), a spiky pixie, blunt bangs, or unnatural dye colors. In other words: conservative hair.

Most of the time, when we're talking about “conservative hairstyles,” we’re not talking about politics, but rather about a look that’s appropriate for working at a bank or something. The idea behind "conservative hair" is that it's inoffensive, generic enough to look good on most people, and bland enough that you don't stand out too much as an individual. (Ha, but in that sense, isn’t it communists who should all have “conservative hair,” lest their individualism come to the fore at the sake of the collective?) So, yes: an updo for long-haired women, a neat bob on others, perhaps even a close-cropped style, but one so regular and even it might not even qualify as a pixie cut. This kind of “conservative hair” is indeed “Republican hair,” or at least the stereotype of Republican hair, even though the term refers to a different type of conservatism.

But it’s not a mere accident that the word “conservative” applies to political leanings as well. Modern conservatism, particularly of the Trumpian variety, is less about fiscal conservatism and more about reverting back to a time when things weren't in as much flux as they are now.“Make America Great Again,” Trump’s critics (of which I am one) will say, is code for “Make America White and Heteronormative Again”—in other words, like the Norman Rockwell version of the 1950s. And what’s the leading iconography of the 1950s? A woman, in the kitchen, wearing a shirtdress, with very neat hair of a short-middle length. If she’s going out at night, she might well wear an updo. Contrast that with the social upheaval of the 1960s, what with women’s hair going loose and free and in their faces*, and voilà—tendrils are liberal; the updos behind them, conservative. So sure, why not? Ivanka Trump wore a bipartisan updo.

Of course, America was never a Norman Rockwell painting, but we picture midcentury American life through that lens, and there’s great appeal there for the conservative voter. It only makes sense that one’s hairstyle would speak to that yen.

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*It’s also worth noting that women with gray hair are likelier to be identified as feminists. Another finding: Women with conservative political leanings preferred men with short hair, while women with liberal leanings preferred men with long hair—in 1976. Times have changed since then but I’d argue that they haven’t changed that much, and that if you’re a wealthy Republican there’s still cultural cachet to short hair on men.

When I got an email with the subject line “Requiem for My Potential Hotness,” I was intrigued—and was hooked when its writer, Rachel McCarthy James, went on to detail how the false split between intelligence and beauty had led to another false split, this one of her own identity. I'm thrilled to host the results of that exchange here. McCarthy James has written for Broadly, Bitch Media, Lit Hub, and The Billfold, among others. You can follow her on Twitter @rmccarthyjames.

“There is surely a difference between being a beautiful person and being a moderately pleasant-looking person. Both get you a certain set of advantages. Are the advantages of being actually hot worth it? I’ll never know.”

Since I saw Ariel and her purple bikini in The Little Mermaid at age three, I wanted to be hot. My parents were more interested in the development of my intellect than my looks, but I still nursed the secret desire to be desired, to be the thing that boys started calling Hot, sometime around the third grade. So I began to believe that Smart was on one end, mutually exclusive with Sexy, and I knew that I should choose Smart. I was scared of the baggage of beauty—the new things people would want from me, say to me, assume about me, the specter of Sex that I could not back away from. My body grew out of control, too big, much too big. And I was scared that I wouldn’t live up, that I would try and fail to be sexy. I wasn’t going to be Britney Spears, that much was clear, so best not to try at all. Safer. So I didn’t learn to do makeup. I didn’t wear my retainer. I wore clothes that looked like what my crush wore, instead of what my crush’s girlfriend wore. I compulsively plucked my eyebrows until they were gone.

But like the slim person who looks back at old photos and thinks, I can’t believe I thought I was fat, I can’t believe I thought I was ugly. I had assumed failure on the scale of Hotness and I wasted so much potential. I assumed hotness was permanently out of my reach, when I could have had all the boyfriends. I have come to understand some things about myself, and one of them is that I am cute with my big frame, like a fuckable Snorlax. One of my friends said, “no one would look at that face and tell you that you’re ugly.”

I’m 30 this month and fat for the last seven years, so probably permanently. I have finally realized that even if I lose 80 pounds (which I won’t), I will never be hot in the way I could have been, in the way I dreamed of when I was a child fantasizing about my adult life. And I’m kind of mad that I was never hot: mad at myself, mad at beauty, and—just a little, in the worst chambers of neurons—mad at women who are hot. I am jealous that other women get to be hot, regardless of age—from Kylie Jenner on up to Jane Fonda, they have beaten me, they have arrived ahead of me, and the part of me that is jealous and nasty and competitive and shallow wants to win, dammit, wants to be the best. But I know it’s wrong. I know it’s wrong not just because misogyny is a false game in which there are no winners, really, but also because they win not because I’m uglier, but because they legitimately work a lot harder than me at being hot, at dieting, at exercise, at makeup, at hair, at clothes. I can’t begrudge someone success based on hard work.

It’s more that I am mad at myself that I didn’t try harder to be conventionally hot when I would have been so. Because of a lot of unfair things—race, class, height, health, shiny hair—my body had many qualities that could have aligned with a certain form of hotness, if I’d pushed the levers a bit more. For a total of maybe 100 non-consecutive hours when I was 20 to 23, I was made up and dressed scantily enough that I probably cleared the bar of Hot. I have pictures. But I found more and more that the effort wasn’t worth the reward, that even at my hottest I would glance across the room and wonder, Is she hotter? I still didn’t win. Also I was drunk most the time. Even though hotness was accessible to me, I found it less than satisfying.

Now, even if I were to weigh less, I will never be able to go back and achieve the Peak Hotness I could have had. I always want to know the truth, and I will never know the truth. Is it that much better to be nigh-objectively attractive? Does everyone treat you better? Do the potential cons—being harassed more, pestered, devalued, assumed to be less smart—outweigh the pros? Would I have been happier? Would I be sadder in the future, to no longer be hot, or is it better to have been hot and lost it than to never have been hot at all? Would I have finally felt like I won? There is surely a difference between being a beautiful person and being a moderately pleasant-looking person. Both get you a certain set of advantages. Are the advantages of being actually hot worth it? I’ll never know.

When I was a little kid, people kept telling me I was going to be a model, because I was tall. When I was a little kid, I kept telling people that I wanted to be the first female Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, because I was smart. I can’t go back to 18, and try harder at hotness or college, and the twelve years that have passed since have knocked me out. Like being an Olympic athlete, being Hot and being a Supreme Court Justice is a road that forks off before the age of 20. Neither of those dreams will be; I am not, by either measure, good enough on those scales.

Of course, hotness is still possible, on any scale, after 30, after 40, after whatever. Helen Mirren is a concept that exists. Iman is at present more beautiful than me on my wedding day in any timeline in the multiverse, even the ones where I put in a bunch of effort. And as my editor commented on an early draft: “Most women I know my age—around 40—report their early 30s as being their own Peak Hotness.” If I really wanted to, I could probably become a hottie still, even without losing a bunch of weight. Ashley Graham isn’t much younger or thinner than I am. But it would take a lot more time, money, and effort than if I’d began taking beauty seriously at 12, or 15, or 22. Instead, I’m spending that free time learning French and hoping I pick up some elegance by osmosis. It’s not that being 30 disqualifies me from intense beauty; it’s just that I’m just unlikely to find the motivation to turn this particular car around. I want to get pregnant soon; my figure and my priorities will reshuffle again. I don’t expect being fuckable to suddenly jump several notches in my bucket list, and why would I want it to? It’s a bother, unnecessary because: I like who I am and I like how I look, even—maybe because—my own brand of magnetism doesn’t really register on the scales of the people who define hotness.

But I’m still good enough. I went to a women’s college; I made friends; I found an intellectual voice; I found a lover. None of them required me to be Hot, and eventually it slipped out of my plans and dreams. Hotness is always a short-term goal, and I was more interested in parties, friends, food, writing. At Hollins, I saw that there were many kinds of beauty, and that the girl with the pearls and the perfect face in size 2 jeans wasn’t necessarily more pleasing to look at than the chubby girl with an endlessly fascinating MAC kit with more brilliant shiny tubs of eyeshadow than there are crayons in a box and a way of telling vivid color stories with cardigans, scarves, and accessories. I also learned that people thought I was cool and interesting and smart even when I didn’t shower for six days in a row and wore the same hoodie, pajama pants, and Crocs to class every day for a semester. Suddenly having friends who admired me regardless of my appearance changed my relationship to my appearance for good, and for better. Instead of being just another Rachel who didn’t look like Jennifer Aniston, I leaned into my simple nickname: RMJ. My own invention, undefined by beauty, stipulated by me.

I did not spend my twenties being as breathtakingly beautiful as I perhaps could have, but I also spent them having fun and sex and happiness. If I had spent them being Hot, would I be able to look at myself in the mirror and smile at my wrinkles, or would they only remind me of the decay still to come? I don’t know. I’ll never know that particular truth.

The work of guest writer Keah Brown first came to my attention with her nuanced critical view of disability and film in Catapult, and my appreciation of her work only deepened with "The Freedom of a Ponytail,"an essay about the triumph of learning to put her hair in a ponytail one-handed, as necessitated by the cerebral palsy that affects mobility on the right side of her body. In Lenny Letter, she writes: "[My ponytails] are a promise of more to come, a promise to keep working at them until they are the best that they can be. I find myself wondering back to that list of things I can't do and imagining a world in which I can. ... Being able to put my hair up didn't make me instantly love myself or my body, but it helped me see that I could one day." You can follow her on Twitter here, and visit her website here.

"And then I watched as their feet grew tired when the night went on and those same heels ended up in their hands or at the tables by their purses." (Photo: Tangi Bertin, Creative Commons license.)

One of the first times I ever felt beautiful was at my high school prom. I stood on the venue’s version of a dancefloor and thanked the classmates who passed by me and complimented my dress. My dress, to this day, is one of the prettiest things I have ever worn, a black and pink ball gown with corset ties and enough tulle to make your head spin. I looked like a princess and felt like one too, with the tiara to match. I believed them when they said I was beautiful. I had no reason not to. I knew that the dress fit my body and skin tone well. I felt at my prettiest then, even as I wore silver sparkly flats that I bought from Payless two nights before. I watched my classmates walk and dance in their sky-high heels with ease. And then I watched as their feet grew tired when the night went on and those same heels ended up in their hands or at the tables by their purses.

The trouble with prom is that it’s only one night, and that feeling of being beautiful ended when it did. However, the envy of the girls and their sky-high heels remained. Though I had plenty of reasons to be jealous of the girls themselves, I found myself specifically envious of their ability to walk in heels. High heels are beautiful. I say this as a person who has never been and will never be able to wear them. I don’t have the coordination and the balance to do so. I heard once that we often crave the things we can’t have. We wish for a scenario or a world in which the thing we can’t have, the thing we can’t do, is possible; we crave a bit of magic. I am and was no different. Growing up as a black disabled woman with cerebral palsy, I wished for many things. I wished for a new body entirely, asking only to wake up with the same black skin, same name, and the same family everything else could go. I wished for knees and feet that didn’t ache after walking through malls and on park trails, grocery stores and movie theaters. And around the time of each high school dance I wished for a magic pair of heels that were secretly made just for me to walk in. I wanted them to be a secret because I feared they wouldn’t work if other people knew about them. I’d like to think that they would appear on my doorstep in a black and white box with a note that read “Keah, here is the only beauty secret you need.” I likened them to The Sisterhood of The Traveling Pants books. I was a huge fan at the time and thought that if they were allowed a pair of magic pants I should be allowed one pair of magic heels. The pair of enchanted heels never came for me but I still found myself admiring heels from afar, picking them up in stores and asking my mom and sister if they thought the heels on the shoes were small enough for me to walk in even when we all knew the answer was no.

There are lots of things I can’t do: cartwheels, backbends and walkovers, fly, wink, or whistle, blow bubbles, crack an egg or the code to the perfect Rubik’s cube, and this is not due to a lack of trying. In fact, I spent many of my adolescent years trying to do cartwheels and backbends at home and after cheer practices with my sister. I spent summers at park programs trying to whistle and blow the biggest bubble while in competition with the other kids. All of this was a result of fearlessness. When you’re younger, fear is a thing you know but not something you practice. Fear is the thing you tuck away in the furthest part of your mind while you do the things you love or dream without abandon. The lack of fear as a young girl is what kept me believing the impossible and continually trying the things that were genuinely impossible. We live in a society that touts the message “nothing is impossible if you believe hard enough!” but that’s simply untrue and quite frankly, harmful.

People with disabilities are regarded as worthy only when we “achieve” and “defy expectations”; we are led to believe that our worth lies in how closely we can align ourselves to the able-bodied, Eurocentric beauty standards that our society holds so dear. After all, high heels are sexy and fun; they make women irresistible and men drool, if you ask any advertisement, movie, TV show, or image eager to convey desirability. The “irresistible” women in these images are never in flats like I was at prom. They’re in heels as high as possible, walking confidently as the heels click-clack on their feet. They are models on the runways of the biggest fashion companies with heels bedazzled and strappy, a silent promise that a heel is the necessary shoe to complete whatever look graces their bodies. When the models aren’t in heels, their look is just as unattainable. They’re shown in t-shirt-and-jeans-and-I-just-woke-up-like-this beauty that is just as alienating. These women do not wear heels all the time but we are lead to believe that certain looks are incomplete without heels, often overlooking the ableist nature of such a message. The images presented to us are easy to buy into. When you are fed the narrative that almost every single body but yours is desirable, you believe it. So it’s easy to look at the images of those same beautiful women in high heels and back at yourself, and think, Maybe I’ll never be as desirable and sexy like those women. It’s not just that we share no similarities in body type, or often, race. It’s also that I can’t even indulge in the primary simulacrum of their sexiness. I can’t even wear their shoes.

When I was in college, my friends and I would sometimes leave campus and go to our Galleria Mall. I would pick out clothes I was almost always too lazy to try on and wait for my friends while they did the responsible thing and made sure their clothes fit before buying them. They would try on their clothes and we’d collectively agree or veto them, and I’d always wander back by the shoes, picking up and putting down heels that were far too thin and too tall for anyone but an expert to walk in. I would sit with the shoes for a bit while waiting for my friends to change and close my eyes and imagine a world where the shoe was both in my size ten foot and wearable. Under my closed lids my friends would ooh and ahh as the heels sculpted my feet like art before I’d take them off and bring them to the register for purchasing. These dreams would end once my name was called or one of my friends stepped out of the dressing room to ask me how the clothes looked, but I enjoyed each moment anyway.

High heels have always been one of the things I’ve loved but could never have. This realization came to me early. I am very familiar with my body’s limitations and I take great care to wear sneakers with heel and arch support when I am walking anywhere regardless of the distance. I often ask myself: How much of my inability to walk in heels is fear, and how much of it is the result of the body I am housed in? Fear, in a twisted way, brings me comfort. Fear is familiar and digestible in a way that the reality of not being able to wear heels is not. Fear allows me the room to lie to myself and say that fear is the only reason I cannot wear heels. When in reality, that’s not the case.

The answer doesn’t exactly matter in the grand scheme of things because the fact of the matter is that it’s just not something I’ll ever be able to do, despite the messages that nothing is impossible. However, when I posed the question of the ability to or to not wear heels on Twitter I was surprised by the response. Like many people, my circumstances, failures, and inability to do certain things have always felt like circumstances I’ve always dealt with alone. As ridiculous as it sounds, I’d already convinced myself that I was the only person in the world who could not wear heels and in turn, could not be desired by anyone. I found out a few weeks ago that this was not only ridiculous but untrue. The same balancing issues that I have, other folks with disabilities have as well. The same aching feet and need for stability is theirs as well, and they still found significant others. Despite the lack of heels in their lives they still love, and are loved. The femininity, desirability, and embrace of womanhood that I feared I did not deserve without the ability to adhere to the standards set and reinforced by society, I’ve had all along. On prom night all those years ago, I felt beautiful without question. Now, despite feeling fear, I am ready to walk through life one flat shoe at a time.

The Olympics are a helluva lot more thought-provoking in thinkpieceland, and in my corner of the internet, that means looking at gymnastics with a critical eye. There’s been fantastic commentary on gymnastics and femininity from Chloe Angyal, The Cut, and Stuff Mom Never Told You—all of whom take a more comprehensive view than I do here—but I’ve spent too much time watching the Olympics for me to not put my two cents in. (Otherwise I’ll have to admit that I am painfully basic when it comes to the Olympics, developing acute agita over sports I have given zero thought to for four years—steeplechase?!—and to form allegiances to athletes for no reason other than I want to visit their home nations. Dmitriy Balandin’s gold medal in the 200-meter breaststroke saw me leaping to my feet and chanting KAZ-AKH-STAN!!! like a...like a Kazakh. Anyway.)

Angyal has pointed out that the visible girlishness of gymnastics has risen along with its athleticism, its makeup and glitter ticking up in tandem with the musculature of the athletes over the years. Makeup is also a part of what we’ve come to think of as gymnastics behavior. Which is to say, girlish behavior. Hugs all around every time a competitor comes back to the sidelines, high-toned assurances, pats on the back, the occasional squeal, that pitch-perfect confidence mixed with the grateful humility we ask of our Olympians. The drive, focus, and passion to pursue a goal, embodying a form of American girlishness that’s admirable to feminist types such as myself. Add to that the contemporary accoutrements of gymnastics—the Swarovski crystal leotards, the pert ponytails, and, yes, the makeup—and it seems that our quintessential gymnast isn’t just visually encoded as feminine, she’s the ideal American girl. She’s pretty, nice, well-behaved, and disciplined, and she kicks international ass. (It’s worth noting here that gymnastics is one of the few sports where, absent a gender modifier, the athlete is presumed to be female.)

Which brings us to Gabby Douglas. It’s upsetting to read about the hatred directed toward her, which turns nauseating once race is inevitably brought into it. At the same time, I did notice that she didn’t put her hand over her heart during the national anthem; I didnotice that she wasn’t visibly rushing to congratulate teammates who had fared better than she in these Olympics. I didn’t draw conclusions about Douglas or her character by it, but I noticed. And the reason I noticed was because she was different than the other competitors. More reserved, less bubbly. More observant, less indulgent. More—forgive me, but this is the word that comes to mind—womanly, less girlish, even as I know plenty of effervescent adult women and have witnessed reserved teen girls aplenty.

Douglas’s reserve shouldn’t become a point of attack on her in the least; she’s a remarkable athlete, and I’ve seen only graciousness from her off the floor. But her demeanor was that of an outlier from the expected form of femininity in this context.I don’t think Gabby Douglas would be facing this vitriol were she, say, a track and field competitor. It’s the image of the contemporary gymnast that’s at issue here, and to me, that’s where the makeup comes in too. Gymnasts “need” makeup to be in accord not only with femininity and to soften the image of their athleticism, but to be in accord with the image and behavior of a gymnast. That’s where Douglas “fails,” if you want to call it that—the behavior part—and that’s where she’s being punished. Other gymnasts who have “failed” here include McKayla Maroney and Aliya Mustafina. Both of them were roundly whipped on social media, but neither to the degree that Douglas has been, and yep, race is the differentiating factor here. It’s one thing to be called a diva, or to have your “not impressed” face go viral, but their whiteness was a buffer from the vitriol Douglas has received. Race is unquestionably an enormous factor here, and in ways that are intertwined with reserve and expression, as this piece, “Gabby Douglas and the Right to Be Visibly Disappointed,” points out—and also intertwined with appearance and beauty standards, including, of course, black athletes’ hair.

Makeup in the realm of gymnastics doesn’t just “soften” the incredible athletic power of American gymnasts, though. It reinforces their girlish, bubbly image. This piece on gold-medal-winning shot putter Michelle Carter demonstrates that: “For a couple of years, being professional, I kind of questioned myself. Should I wear my false lashes or take the time I want to take so I can feel good when I go out on the field?” the athlete and certified makeup artist said in The New Yorker. “Because nobody else was really doing that. And I thought, No: I’m not going to change what I believe I should look like to fit anybody else’s standards. I believe if you look your best, you’re going to feel your best, you’re going to do your best.”

If we truly required all our female athletes to use makeup as an apology for their strength, shot putters would “need” that styling even more than gymnasts because of their incredible power and heft. But as Carter says, it was a bold move for her to sport her look—false eyelashes, winged liner—in competition. Makeup becomes political for Carter because it’s showing that female athletes can look ferociously powerful and still wear a fierce lip if they desire, and will be taken seriously either way. Carter’s makeup is a statement not of adherence to femininity but of the diverse ways one can be a woman: A full face of makeup runs counter to our ideas of force and power, like the strength required to hurl a metal ball 20 meters with the force of a cannonball. You’d think that would mean that culturally female shot-put athletes would be required to “compensate” by feminizing themselves with makeup, but that’s not the case. It’s the marriage of an artistic sport and the sex of the competitor that sees makeup be de rigueur in gymnastics yet outlying in shot-put. The expectation of feminine expression is different for each type of sport, and that expression remains even when makeup is taken out of the equation. Douglas’s looks didn’t escape rebuke, of course, but those who vilified her primarily did so because she didn’t behave like the ideal girl.

Olympics aside, the ways we’re seeing gender expectations play out illustrate another problem I keep running into with theorizing makeup. Until we divorce makeup from conventional femininity and the expectations attached to it, we won't really know what we think about makeup as opposed to what we think about womanhood itself.If men wore lipstick in numbers as great as women, would people who find makeup a waste of time or an exercise in vanity still feel the same way? They might; historically, such men have been seen as foppish, even when they weren’t unusual. But just as likely, we might reevaluate makeup in a different light, seeing it for its possibilities instead of its limitations, or as an expression of character as opposed to an expression of traits associated with one gender. (Or of gender, period, for that matter.)

I think about the extraordinarily careful line these young women have to walk, so publicly, and under such intense pressure. (This goes double for Simone Biles, who has probably learned some sad, quiet lessons from watching how Douglas has been treated for being an outstanding black girl in a historically white sport. Can you imagine the vitriol if Biles, largely acknowledged as the best gymnast who has ever lived, had the gall to not only be the best in the world but to not appear kind and gracious and perfectly girlish at every moment?) I keep watching the faces of each gymnastics team member, waiting for that telltale twitch that reveals the fierce competitive spirit that accompanies being a world champion—I mean, here they are, competing against one another for something they’ve been dreaming about since second grade, and you tell me they’re always full sweetness and support? I still haven’t seen their faces betray them, and I don’t know whether that’s because they’re really good actresses, or because they’ve had to learn to reconcile their genuine wish to support one another with their genuine wish to win, or because they’ve developed the kind of grace that means they don’t even see those desires as being at odds with each other. I suspect it’s probably all of those reasons, and more. It takes a triple-backflip-dismount level of grace to appear as noncompetitive in a competitive environment as remarkably as these athletes do. Their ability to land it every time one of them ousts the other for first place or for a spot in the finals showcases and elevates that new ideal of femininity. Which means that every time one of them falls outside of that ideal, even for a moment, they have even farther to fall.

Thanks to Nina Bhatti, I found my perfect foundation. The founder of Kokko—an app that promises to find you a foundation that actually matches your skin—has the kind of background that makes her current project seem almost inevitable: She’s the former chief scientist of the mobile color research group at Hewlett-Packard, a former senior technologist for Nokia, and a woman who has wanted to have good makeup at her disposal without reading women’s magazines like a part-time job. Her creation is deceptively simple: You download the Kokko app, then take a selfie alongside Kokko’s color chart, which is the analog bit that makes this digital tool so excellent: By measuring your skin color alongside the known quantity of the color chart, Kokko has more to work with than less precise makeup matching apps, meaning you’ll wind up with one foundation that’s just right instead of six that are almost right. They’re actually giving The Beheld readers the chart for free until July 11; go here and use the code AUTUMN (heh! I’m a mononym!), and you’ll just pay $1.30 for shipping.

I spoke with Nina about the technical aspects of color matching, why there’s no Seamless for makeup (yet), and why she refused to learn to type. In her own words:

On Color

You know how some people have perfect pitch? There are so few in the human system who have perfect color, but we all have that friend who has that eye for color—those people who are like, “You need more blue in that red, it looks better with your skin,” while the rest of us are like, “It just looks red!” I wanted people to have that friend there with them, whispering in their ear. Color is incredibly complex. It’s perceptual—the color you put next to it will make that color appear differently, that’s how your brain works—and it’s also about what is going on physically in your eye. Then you’ve got the quality of the light that’s on any given color. It’s so complicated, and yet so much of aesthetics is about color.

The only people who really have that depth of understanding about color are color scientists. The way that they measure color is by using these very scientific, controlled devices to measure color. They have a specific light that shines on an object, they have a specific angle, a specific amount of diffuseness in the light. They’d measure the reflectance at every wavelength, the specific receiver technology. It’s this really technical way of measuring color. That’s all well and good, but I’m thinking about new users who aren’t going to drive around with this scientific instrument. What could they do?Well, these days the mobile devices with cameras are the vehicle of choice, so let’s use that. The color scientists didn’t actually like the research when I started it. Their own work is measured on these incredibly accurate measures—sort of like, 10 decimal places of accuracy. It’s important for paint companies, but that’s not the degree of accuracy we needed. I said, “Okay, I don’t have to be perfect the way you guys are, because if there’re only a certain number of shades of foundation, I only need to just pick the one.” People who know about color didn’t ever want to do approximate color matching because it just violates their sensibility. They’re not thinking about its application domain. I came at it from a very strong belief in the consumer problem.

The Kokko ColorChart: By giving the camera a known color quantity that's photographed alongside the user's face, the chart lets the app be more precise than it would just by the camera alone.

The whole idea of using the color chart is something that was used in the very early Technicolor movies. When you develop film you can affect the final colors by adjusting the developing chemicals —so what’s the right color? Technicolor’s color supervisor, Natalie Kalmus, came up with a calibration. They developed this chart that they called a lily, and they’d hold up that up front of the camera and would use that to find the correct, consistent color. She actually figured that out. She’s the one who actually developed Technicolor color accuracy. So you have that kind of process, and you have the process where you go to a makeup artist and they look at your skin and characterize what product is going to work. I took the manual process and tried to automate it. So once we get your skin color correct, we find what product to put on that. We used an expert system to determine how makeup artists would characterize lots and lots of women—we actually had women come in and had makeup artists match foundation to their skin—and then used that data to figure out what the unknown woman would like. It’s perfect for computer and imaging science because that’s what they do—have lots of data and then figure out what the signal is.

On Silicon Valley and Sexism

I refused to take typing in high school. It might have been helpful to me, but I never wanted any job that required knowledge of typing. In those days typing was a gateway to low paying female-dominated professions. I wanted to set my own path and not be bound by society’s definition of female professions. My family expected the girls to do as well as the boys so that was never an issue.

When I was working in computing in the ’90s, there was this weird line you had to walk as a woman. If you cared about your hair and makeup, they didn’t think you were a good engineer. If you didn’t care about your appearance, then you were accepted as technical. It’s different as a corporate manager—there are a lot of women there—but in the engineering ranks it was different. I became one of those technical people who did a lot of customer conversations, because I did clean up well and I could talk to them. But then some of the junior ones would be like, “Can you really program?” It’s not that they think you can’t, it’s that you’re an early example of what a great engineer that also cares about appearance can look like. Being able to look good and be technically strong—there’s a bias there that I can’t explain. I mean, more women go to medical school than men! You can overcome that bias, because you’ll realize, “Wow, that person is really good,” but it takes some cognitive time.

I’m pitching this technology to largely men, and they don’t understand the beauty market. I’ll send an email stating, “We’re solving this makeup problem” and they’re like, “There’s a problem?” One investor said, “I didn’t know [foundation matching] was a problem but I talked to a family member and she said, ‘Yes, I need this—this is huge.’” He was stunned. And that’s an opportunity, that this is unrecognized. There are 101 startups to get dinner to your door—ingredients to your door that you cook, meals to your door that somebody else cooked for you—and nobody has a problem understanding that. With color, women’s eyes light up and get excited about it, but the men who are typically making capital investment decisions aren’t aware.

I don’t think that it’s sexist. There’s a rational reason for them to be wary—there’s a discomfort because they’re not the target market. It’s not that they hate women and don’t want women to have good things—they know $150 billion worldwide is being spent on this stuff. The question for them is, Do I understand this market? Do I have an intuition for it that lets me feel comfortable investing? This is where we want to differentiate between sexism and non-familiarity. These guys are happy to make money—but when you have no intuition for the market, it’s much harder for them to put money in at the earlier stages when there’s very little evidence. That’s not intentional sexism. That’s a current that you have to swim against. This is why people say they want more women in tech in the product design area, but you have places where there’s never been one woman on the team.

On The Right to Beauty

Women are expected to be born with this aesthetic ability—the clothing, the makeup. They’re just supposed to know. I sense a lot of frustration, because a lot of women feel like, I don’t actually know. The makeup buying process has become intimidating unless you study it—which some women do, these mavens who just revel in it and are good at it and get it, which is wonderful. But many of us just want someone to say, “This is going to look great on you,” and trust them. Because women know when everything’s right—you just feel good, you stand a little taller, you walk a little zippier. They know the feeling of feeling good, and they know the feeling of feeling awkward. Color is an important aspect of looking and feeling good, and we’re trying to solve that problem, that awkwardness of not being sure if you’re doing it right.

I don’t see why every woman shouldn’t feel wonderful about herself. Every woman has a legitimate right to beauty. This is technologically enabling that right. Sometimes people might be trying to do makeup but they don’t have that skill, so they might go overboard, and that can be devastating. And there are times in a business setting when you just want to look really pulled together and polished, and makeup can be a part of that setting. That’s different from feeling like, “Oh my god, I have to get out of bed 30 minutes before my husband so I can put my face on.” It’s scary to feel like you can’t be seen as who you are, and I don’t want to live in a world where I have to wear makeup every day and can’t be seen as my natural self. But this is about enabling people who might not have those makeup skills. I’d like women to have that in their toolkit.

I know, you wanted to make it to the launch party for Face Value last night, but you "had to work" or "got food poisoning" or "live in Germany," fine. Well, you missed out on the free booze, but you can still listen to the night's soundtrack. All these songs are about appearance in some way—odes to beautiful people, admonitions to stay beautiful, paeans to the ways we prettify ourselves, an embrace of ugliness, a mantra of pride, you get the picture. (Apologies for the many covers of a few key songs, like "I Feel Pretty"—when a song was really perfect I didn't see a problem with playing its variations. Like this amazing punk version.)

Two notes: 1) I do not necessarily endorse the messages in any of these songs—surprisingly, there were no songs titled "Hey Women's Relationship to Beauty Is Really Complex and Doesn't Really Rhyme Well." 2) I was pleased to discover that I really, really like RuPaul.

*When this song—a delight from an all-female Canadian metal band about looking pretty as one digs one's own grave—played at the party, my agent checked in with me to make sure that the bar was still playing my playlist. They were.

The day has come: My book, Face Value: The Hidden Ways Beauty Shapes Women's Lives, is out! You can see a list of retailers here at Simon & Schuster’s site, request it at your local bookstore, click through to the ubiquitous Amazon, etc. etc. you know the drill. (If you’re in New York, why don’t you swing by the launch party at Beauty Bar on Thursday and buy one there from Astoria Bookshop?) And you've shared your results from our 100% accurate, scientifically proven "What Color Lipstick Is Your Soul?" quiz on social media, right?

I’ve been so pleased with the early response: The Boston Globe called Face Value“a fascinating look at a surprisingly broad topic,” Bustle named it one of their top summer nonfiction reads, and Elle and Huffington Post both allowed me to have great conversations with Elyssa Goodman and Alanna Vagianos, respectively. (HuffPo also used my Instagram photo of our cat, which thrills me to no end.) I also have an essay in this month’s Marie Claire, and over the weekend the Wall Street Journal let me throw down some real talk about the science of beauty. I should also confess that I’ve made my blog love polyamorous, and am now blogging at Psychology Today in addition to maintaining The Beheld here. My blog at Psychology Today, also called Face Value, has a more distinctly psychological focus than what I do here, though obviously there’s thematic overlap.

My “elevator pitch” for the book is pretty much this: It’s an examination of how beauty and appearance affect us—our relationships with other women, our romances, the language we use, the way we view and create media, the stories we tell about our lives. My generation is the first to grow up with the main idea behind The Beauty Myth—the idea that beauty standards have been reinforced as a response to women’s growing power in the world—floating around out there. I wanted to know how that truth shapes how we interact with beauty: how it shaped not only our beauty rituals and our compliance with the beauty standard, but also our feelings about that standard, about ourselves, about the intersection between beauty and feminism.

What I found is that women’s relationship to beauty—and, increasingly, men’s—is complex, contradictory, and symbolic of contemporary questions about what exactly womanhood means. The Beauty Myth never claimed that caring about your looks was anti-feminist, but it was easy to misread it that way, and suddenly feminism and beauty came to be seen as being in opposition to one another. This book attempts to correct that idea, without dismissing the problematic areas of appearance, by digging deep into the contradictions of beauty. I can’t claim that I reach that many hard-and-fast conclusions; I don’t. But I hope to shed light on those contradictions so that readers can continue on their own.

Will you allow me a sentimental aside? This is probably going to sound trite or cheesy, but it is the truth: I could not have done it without you. By “you” I mean readers who have commented, readers who have sent me private emails, readers who have shared my work, readers who also happen to be writers who have allowed me the privilege of conversing about these rich topics with them. Conversation is the heart of Face Valuein two ways: Much of the book is interview-based (including interviews with some of you), but more important, my greatest hope is that the book inspires conversation. As a writer I’m of course riding the high of the public conversation surrounding the book, but that will dwindle pretty quickly. The conversations I hope will last are the ones happening between friends, between classmates, between acquaintances, between strangers on the internet, between mothers and daughters and sisters and aunts. If Face Valuecan help prompt any of those conversations alive among—yes, I’m using this word without my tongue in my cheek—the sisterhood, I’d be honored.

My fascination with beauty product names began with Havana. It was the early 2000s, I was copy editing at a teen magazine, and as I read the beauty pages I saw that a blush had the absurdly long name of Lancôme Blush Subtil Shimmer Shimmer Mocha Havana, and I thought, This name can't be right, because A) "Shimmer" was in there twice, and B) Havana has café au lait, not mocha, and as a young copy editor I was extraordinarily literal. I went to the beauty editor, who, quite rightly, looked at me like I was being a pedant, and assured me that Lancôme Blush Subtil Shimmer Shimmer Mocha Havana was an entirely reasonable name for a blush.

The thing is, she's right. Beauty companies come up with these intensely long names for their products; you've got to get the brand name in there, then the name of the line, then the name of the shade. Even a pretty reasonably named product winds up being something like—and I'm just grabbing the nearest magazines here—Clarins Colour Quench Lip Balm in Strawberry Shimmer, or Laura Geller New York Eye Rimz Baked Wet/Dry Eye Accents in Enchanted Forest, or...Lancôme Blush Subtil Shimmer Shimmer Mocha Havana. Even without trying to be ridiculous, they become exactly that.

I’m tempted to immediately finger the absurdity as being gendered, but before we get to that, allow me to point out that men and women alike succumb to the allure of evocative color names. According to this study, shades like "Mocha Almond Fudge" and "Meadow" were rated as more appealing than plain old "brown" and "green" by both men and women. The colors were exactly the same, but Meadow just sounds...greener, somehow. With makeup, though, it’s a gendered product, so of course the marketing around it is going to be gendered. It’s not hard to come up with a feminist analysis of shade names: We’re given permission to liberally use products whose namesakes we’re supposed to use with restriction. Food, of course (cherries, plums, chocolate, coffee), but also sex (Nars Orgasm), alcohol (Urban Decay’s Bourbon and Whiskey), adventure (Smashbox’s Nude Beach), and even freedom itself (Tarte’s Young, Wild & Free). That’s not even getting into shade names that spring from cultural co-opting (MAC’s Dervish, Illamasqua’s Berber).

All that said: I love them. At their most elegant they’re fantastically seductive; at their silliest they highlight the playful aspect of beauty products that makes them a source of connection. I’m also a sucker for any two-minute quiz that purports to tell you something about who you really are—what designer are you? what Game of Thrones character are you? dog breed? (Diane von Furstenberg, Khal Drogo, and shar pei, for the record.) So when my friend Mary Potts (who has worked on ad campaigns for beauty brands and other assorted ladystuff) came up with the idea of a site that would tell people what lipstick their soul was wearing, I called her a genius and spent the day cackling in her living room while we dreamed up ludicrous lipstick names and watching her computer-programmer husband develop the tool. We wanted them to be outlandish, nearing the point of grotesquerie—but the thing is, there are actual beauty products out there that aren’t far removed from these, you know? Urban Decay gives us shades like LSD, Roach, Mainline, and Uzi; Essie gives us Nama-Stay the Night; Obsessive Compulsive Cosmetics lets us choose from Strumpet, Stalker, or Grandma. And while the thought of a company mocking the Supreme Court desegregation ruling of Brown vs. Board of Education by coming out with Greige vs. Board of Education is monstrous, it wasn’t that long ago that Rodarte named a makeup collection after Ciudad Juárez, notorious for its hundreds of women who have been violently murdered, with little to no police attention.

The lipstick tool is fun, and you can certainly use it without going deep, but since it is essentially a book promotion device for a book that’s fun but that aims to get women talking about the role beauty plays in their lives, I also wanted it to raise questions about what it actually means when the beauty industry gets fanciful. What are these companies trying to evoke in you? Is it an acknowledgment of the complexity of women’s lives—that some women enjoy LSD, or smoke roaches (or just live with roaches), or mainline other drugs, or use Uzis? Is it an assumption that its buyers don’t do those things but romanticize them, letting the brand seem edgy at the expense of people who really are mainlining heroin and living with roaches? Was Lancôme telling us to wear mocha blush because we’re not supposed to be eating chocolate, or is it a way of saying we have every right to have as much mocha as you like, or is it just another way of saying brown? Should we be feeling a naughty little pleasure at buying Nars Orgasm when sexist, heteronormative assumptions about orgasms still run rampant?

Check it out, tell me what color lipstick your soul is wearing (today my soul is wearing Pap Smear Luster, a change from yesterday’s We-Get-It-You-Hate-the-Word-Moist Papaya), and if you’re so compelled, share it. And if you happen to be a cosmetic chemist who wants to help me actually make Slut-Shaming Velveteen lipstick come to life, let me know.

My friend Deborah from college loves to tell this story: One of the first times we hung out, we started talking about her solo travels to Burma and assorted other spots in Southeast Asia. I was 19 years old, and like most 19-year-olds, nearly all my friends were people I met through school in some fashion, meaning that virtually all my friends were people within a two-year age range of myself (four years max, though given the dynamics of high school and even collegiate hierarchies, anything more than two years was a stretch). But as she was regaling me with her thrilling tales, I realized she couldn’t have traveled so extensively if she were my age, and it dawned on me that I was talking to someone Older.

I’d heard you weren’t supposed to ask people how old they were—what if they were Old?!—but I couldn’t help myself. I asked her old she was, and she told me, and, according to her, I gasped, fluttered my hand to my chest, and said, “But you look so good!"

Deborah was 26.

I turn 40 this week, and this story, which was embarrassing to me the first time she told it—she had the good sense to wait to relay it to me until I was in my 30s and therefore old enough to appreciate it—has now become hilarious. It’s hilarious that I thought 26 was shockingly old, and that I thought 26 would be old enough to show signs of aging in a way that would be detrimental to one’s conventional beauty. (In fact, it seems that would be anything over 31, if we’re going by sheer numbers here—and while I’m tempted to call bullshit on that, given that people may be more satisfied with their looks the older they get, I also know that age 31 was probably when I looked objectively my best.)

We still don’t really know what aging looks like. Certainly younger people don’t, and everyone reading this is younger than someone. I used to be vaguely flattered when younger people would express surprise when I’d mention my age, until I recalled my own response to Deborah’s ancient 26. It wasn’t that I knew what 26 looked like and that she looked younger than that; it was that I had no idea what looking 26 might actually entail, just that it was older than what I’d been led to believe was the height of my own attractiveness, and that therefore the fact that she looked great at 26 meant she was an outlier and therefore warranted a cry of “But you look so good!"When a younger person tells me I “don’t look 40”—or, my favorite, that I’m “well preserved” (!), I accept it with grace but always wonder if they’ll later recall that moment with their own embarrassment. Because I do look 40, and I'm not particularly “preserved.” They just have no idea what 40 looks like, and it’s not their fault. Until it was within eyeshot, I didn’t know myself.

What we consider older (or younger) is always in relation to ourselves. Older was once my 26-year-old friend; now that my circle of friends has loosened beyond the age constrictions of school and I have friends in their 50s, even people in their 60s don’t seem so old to me. My parents, once hopelessly old to me, I now see as—I can’t say young, but when I wanted to talk about Mad Men with them, my mother said they were saving television for “deep retirement.” Meaning not the retirement they’re in now—my father retired from paid work nearly 10 years ago, and my mother retired from homemaking as well, a feminist arrangement I adore—but a later form of retirement, when they’re too frail to travel extensively as they’re doing now. That is: When they’re Old.

There’s a particular sort of human-interest news piece that takes a person over 70 who is doing something—anything, really—and treats the fact that they are not sewn into a La-Z-Boy as a small miracle. We are supposed to find this inspiring, and I suppose it is. But it is not unique. The fact that younger folk still regard active elderly people as outliers says little about them, and everything about us. We expect old people to curl up and—well, die, I suppose (though our society is still so scared shitless of death that we spend 28 percent of our Medicare dollars in the last six months of life). So when they don’t, we’re surprised, even though we shouldn’t be. There are indeed old people who spend their days mostly watching television and complaining about their aches, but there are young people who do that too. My grandmother, who turns 90 next month, teaches line dancing lessons at her retirement home. I’m proud of her. She is not an outlier.

This idea that old people—whatever each of us considers to be old—are outliers for not fitting into what we expect of them goes double for beauty. That makes a sort of sense, given that the hallmarks of beauty are so closely associated with youth, so when a woman of a certain age still has some of those hallmarks, it is remarkable. Except: It’s not, not really, given that so much of the attention we do give to famous older women has less to do with their beauty and more with their grooming. Take the case of Helen Mirren, whom the media has long crowned as the sexy senior (which started happening 15 years ago, incidentally, back when she was the same age Julia Louis-Dreyfus is now). She’s a lovely woman, and exceptionally accomplished, but the attention paid to her sex appeal after age 50 has largely been about her refusal to style herself in a matronly fashion. (I don’t know enough about celebrity fashion to say for sure, but I’m guessing that she ushered in today’s era, when celebrities over 50 aren’t afraid to show some skin, and look great in it.) When I walk through this city, I see a lot of older women who groom themselves just as beautifully, and I’m not just talking about the Iris Apfels of the world. I’m talking my gym buddy Lynn, whose loose bun and oh-so-slightly-off-the-shoulder tees echo her life as a dancer; I’m talking my neighbor Dorothy, whose loose movie-star curls fall in her face when she talks; I’m talking real women you know, who take care of themselves, and who may or may not have the bone structure of Carmen Dell’Orefice but who look pretty damn good anyway. Part of the joke of Amy Schumer’s sublime “Last Fuckable Day” sketch was the fact that all of the women in it were perfectly good-looking. We know that women don’t shrivel up and die after 50, but we’re still not sure how to truly acknowledge it, so we continue to rely on outdated conversations about aging. I mean, the opening slide of that Amy Schumer sketch is: “Uncensored: Hide Your Mom.”

There’s a paradox built into acknowledging older women’s beauty: By calling attention to both their appearance and their age, we continue to treat older women who continue an otherwise unremarkable level of grooming as exceptions. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t do so; Advanced Style, for example, is near-radical in its presentation of older women, and I’d hate for it to become just...Style. And I absolutely don’t want to say that we should start sweeping older women back under the male gaze; escaping that level of scrutiny is one of the benefits of growing older. I’m also aware of the folly of using the way we talk about celebrities as a stand-in for how we talk about age more generally—the only people whose ages we collectively examine are famous people, whose ages only come up for discussion in regard to looks if we’re all like A) Wow, that person doesn’t look that old (Cicely Tyson, 91), or B) Wow, that person looks way older than that (Ted Cruz, 45). Nobody is like, Wow, Frances McDormand is 58? And she looks it too! Still, celebrities are a useful comparison point for how our notions of age are changing, even if the ways we talk about it aren’t. Anne Bancroft was 36 when she was cast as Mrs. Robinson. A selection of women who are 36 today: Zooey Deschanel, Laura Prepon, Mindy Kaling, Rosamund Pike, Claire Danes. Kim Kardashian turns 36 in October. Can you imagine any of these people being cast as a scandalously older woman today?

Our ideas of age are indeed changing, and pretty rapidly at that, given how much longer people are living, and how much healthier they are during that time. And people in their early midlife seem to be treating their 40s and 50s differently than people in prior generations did. I remember lots of gravestone-themed “Over the Hill” balloons for my father’s 40th birthday; the last 40th birthday party I went to, we kept raging until 5 a.m. Add to that the idea of “extended adolescence” and it’s not hard to see how people might well see their own lives not “really” starting until their 30s, or even later. “Forty is the new 30” was the mantra my high school and college friends chanted to one another ten years ago, when the parade of 30th-birthday celebrations began, meaning that it was okay that we hadn’t yet accomplished the things we wanted to. We were jazzed to be 30, as we’d heard women who were there already assure us that we’d be happier in this decade—that we’d spent our 20s figuring things out and making mistakes (lots of mistakes), and that in our 30s, we’d be hitting our strides. And now that 40 is here, I’m hearing the same things, from the same slightly older women: that my 40s will be happier, more assured, better. I was right to believe them ten years ago—my thirties have been pretty good—so I’m going to believe them now. The biggest difference in what I’ve heard from the chorus of women over 40 as compared with the same women 10 years ago is that in my 40s, I’m less likely to care what other people think of me. I hope that is true.

Even with all those changes, though, there we are, with people in their 20s looking at me and remarking upon how well-preserved I am. We know that what it means to be old is changing. We just aren’t sure what old looks like.

People sometimes make the mistake of thinking that because I’m into beauty, I must also be into fashion. I enjoy clothes that I find attractive, but fashion? Frankly, it bores me. My preference for the beauty world is partly practical (the price point is lower) and partly narcissistic (I can’t really see myself in clothes since I don’t have a full-length mirror, but I see my face a zillion times a day, so I’d rather just adorn that).

But sometimes I think the real reason I’ve always been drawn to makeup is its subversive possibilities. There’s obvious subversion—goth-girl eyeliner and the like—but that’s not what I mean. What I mean is that makeup looks like it’s the stuff of soft, feminine compliancy, but if you want it to be, it can be steel. Someone might look at you with good-girl makeup on—all tasteful lip liner and dainty blush—and make the mistake of taking you at face value. But you know that those tubes and creams channel your game face before you walk out the door every day. They don’t give it to you; that’s yours already. But if you imbue your lipstick with the possibility of swagger, that is exactly what it will bring out. Let them think you just care about making your lips look like ripe berries. You know the bud that comes before the fruit.

I’m not sure whether any of the characters in Sarai Walker’s novel Dietland would agree with me on this front. You might have heard of the book (the paperback version comes out Tuesday), which received appropriately rave reviews from select corners of the internet, with the juicy cover blurb for the upcoming paperback reading “Fight Club meets Margaret Atwood.” (I dare you to not read it now, with that kind of endorsement.) But the idea that beauty is subversion is actually what sets Dietland's action in motion. The book got a lot of attention for its crushing of what you might call “fuckability mores.” The main character, Plum—a young, fat employee of a teen magazine looking forward to her upcoming weight-loss surgery—becomes entangled with an underground feminist collective that at one point throws her into a crash course on “fuckability,” leaving her waxed, wobbling in high heels, and questioning whether the supposed rewards of weight-loss surgery are worth it. Combine this storyline with the book’s news bursts about a vigilante organization that targets people who have committed acts of violence against women—an organization that may or may not have ties to the collective Plum is involved with—and the book’s message seems clear. The things women do to make ourselves look fuckable are acts of violence against women, oppression at its most masterful.

Beauty goes deeper in Dietland, though. Walker treats beauty satirically throughout, to the point of ludicrousness—at one point, an editor is caught masturbating with a lipstick tube, and another woman is nearly crushed to death by eyebrow pencils. Which makes sense, as beauty culture itself can be nearly as ludicrous: We put hot wax on our genitals, snail slime on our faces, and chemicals on our skin to make it look tan. But it’s really the ways the heroine gets drawn into the book’s events that shows the deeper potential for beauty. Through her job at a teen magazine, Plum meets Julia Cole, the manager of the beauty closet, a massive hangar-like space filled with cosmetics that the media conglomerate’s female employees can use before media appearances. Julia looks the part of a pert, shiny beauty manager, but it’s a disguise—she is literally unrecognizable without her shapewear and makeup—that she wears to commit feminist espionage.Julia’s position as beauty closet manager works nicely on the level of sheer storytelling, both logistically and thematically, as beauty is a pretty straightforward package in which to deliver a feminist critique. Women are frequently told that beauty is where the answers are, and in Plum’s case that’s literally true: That’s where she’s first clued into what becomes the main action of the book.

Throughout much of Dietland, as in much of feminist discourse, beauty in its traditional forms—including both the starved, plucked beauty that conventional femininity invites, as well as the beauty industry at large—is, if not the enemy, the enemy’s avatar. But it’s not just irony that sees the beauty closet as the place where Plum begins her awakening: It’s subversion. We’re told that beauty is a way to power, which might be true in a certain limited fashion. But it’s also a route to discovery. Investigating her own body is how many a woman arrives at feminism, and once she’s there, she still might find that beauty is a useful in-road to connecting with other women. Beauty is also how plenty of women have embedded themselves into the worlds of people who just might listen to the cause. Remember, Gloria Steinem was always more radical than Betty Freidan, but because of Steinem’s sensational looks, her feminism was seen as more palatable in the 1960s than Freidan’s. It wasn’t fair, and yes, of course that’s part of what feminism is trying to fix. But that doesn’t mean that in the meantime we should ignore that subversion and write off beauty.

Not that the author herself necessarily agrees with me on this point: “Generally speaking, I don’t find beauty culture to be very subversive,” Walker tells me. “I think sometimes we might like to frame it that way to justify our participation in it as feminists. In my own life, I acknowledge that the use of makeup is a gendered practice, rooted in sexism, but that I wear makeup sometimes because like every other woman, I live in a sexist, looks-based culture that judges me based on my personal appearance.” But even within this acknowledgment that beauty is difficult to subvert, Walker sees possibilities: “There are women in fat activism who are focused on beauty and fashion culture, and I do see some subversive potential there. Fat women are encouraged to be invisible, to wear dark colors and blend into the scenery—until, of course, that magical day when we’ve achieved thinness. So I do see some subversive potential with fat women wearing bright colors, both in makeup and clothing, and asserting a very feminine identity that has traditionally been denied us. This can make fat-haters incredibly angry, like, ‘Who does she think she is?’ If it makes fat haters angry, it’s a good thing! I explore this in Dietland. Part of Plum’s transformation involves her feeling entitled to wear brightly colored feminine clothes, and she sees this as a way to give the finger to fat haters, and as a way to take up space in an unapologetic way. I think there are limits to what this can achieve as activism, but it can be powerful in some ways.”

Walker brings up another key point to what I see as the subversive possibilities of beauty: “I wanted to consider these products as part of women’s material culture—whether one likes it or not—and how this is a culture that for the most part excludes men,” Walker told me. “Men don't normally like being excluded from things, but as a group they seem to be fine with it in this case, and I think it's because makeup carries the ‘taint’ of femininity that most men don't want to be associated with.”I’ve always argued that beauty creates spaces for women to connect—sometimes literal spaces, as in the intimacy of hair salons, and sometimes figurative spaces, in that beauty talk can make for an easy conversational entrée. But this idea of beauty’s taint brings up a richer idea: that women are creating a culture for themselves that just might have jack shit to do with appealing to the male gaze. It’s tricky ground, of course; the vast majority of beauty work does appeal to the male gaze. But anytime women create a cultural space for themselves, and only for themselves (as well as genderqueer folks, and men who are willing to embrace that feminine stigma), a germ of subversion—perhaps of rebellion—is planted.

“All makeup is drag,” says Julia the first time she meets Plum. And at first glance, that might be the main takeaway of beauty presented here. But after her transformation, we also see Plum ask a makeup sales clerk to rim her eyes again, and again, with the deepest black eyeliner the store has. “My goal isn’t to look fuckable,” she says. “The look I want is Don’t fuck with me.”

It’s tempting here to be like, “See, Plum CHOOSES it so it’s different!” But I’m always hesitant to fall back on the language of choice as a feminist go-ahead for makeup, or high heels, or shapewear. It borrows the lexicon of reproductive rights, and while women’s bodies are at the center of both beauty work and reproduction, equating them feels pat. A woman should be able to terminate a pregnancy without justification, and I don’t want women to feel the need to justify their beauty work. But beauty work is not as black-and-white as abortion either, and there is room for considering reasons here. All makeup is notdrag: When you want your makeup to say Don't fuck with me, you’re stepping out of high drag and stepping into motion. That’s easier to see when you’re wearing makeup in a way that is stylistically subversive. But that woman in the pearly pink gloss of steel? Her armor is not to be fucked with either.

“I remember when I was young, during my first trip to Chengdu, standing amid the hustle and bustle of crowds on Chunxi Road, where, no matter what clothes you were wearing or whether you opened your mouth to speak, from the wisps of natural rouge upon one’s face everyone could immediately identify a Tibetan girl.” So goes this piece, initially published on WeChat (a messaging platform popular in Tibet) by a young Tibetan student, which introduced me to “plateau redness,” the characteristic bright red cheeks of Tibetan people. It’s a feature I’d not known that I’d noticed, but when I stopped to think of iconic images of Tibetans, red cheeks were indeed an unmistakable feature.

That might not be the case much longer. The conditions that prompt plateau redness haven’t changed, of course; the cold, windy, elevated plateau continues to dilate the blood vessels of Tibetan faces. But Tibetan women are subject to the same beauty ideals of women in China, where pale, unmarked skin has become the standard-bearer of beauty. Products that promise to erase or camouflage plateau redness line the shelves of cosmetics stores in Lhasa. People are also more likely to protect their skin from the sun now (sun damage in and of itself doesn’t cause the redness, but it exaggerates its effect). Add in the unique political concerns of Tibet and the ways state-run Chinese media examines the issue, and plateau redness becomes a case study of how beauty, identity, policy, and culture are inextricably entwined.

I urge you to read the original essay here; the writer cannot be identified for safety reasons. Tricia Kehoe, an Irish scholar of Tibet, translated the essay—and penned a follow-up, which is adapted below. You can read Kehoe’s original post here, and you can follow her on Twitter here. Many thanks to reader Willa who pointed me toward this essay coupling in the first place.

Reading through a few articles from Xinhua, China News, and other major news outlets, I noticed that state media have been quite consistent in their discussions of plateau redness. Like most reportage on Tibet in state media, the plateau redness coverage was framed by discourses of science, progress, development, and increasing integration with interior China and the world, often juxtaposing “old Tibet” and “new Tibet.”

In 2013 a piece from state mouthpiece Xinhua entitled “Tibet’s ‘Plateau Redness’ is Becoming Rarer” explained that the disappearance of plateau redness is simply a case of Tibetans coming to “understand more of scientific culture (kexue wenhua)” and “how better to protect themselves.” In a bizarre attempt to put a positive spin on climate change, the same piece, quoting a professor of medicine at Tibet University, also made the argument that:

Global warming is leading to an increase in Tibet’s vegetation, more rainfall, more moisture, and an increase in the amount of oxygen in the air. These changes are making peoples’ skin better able to retain moisture, thus lessening the occurrence of dry, cracked skin, and plateau redness.

More typically, state media tends to dismiss plateau redness as an illness of bygone times before health awareness took hold. Citing Nyima Tsering, director of the Tibetan Medicine Institute in the Tibet Autonomous Region, a China News article in 2015 entitled “The Plateau Redness that is now Disappearing” stated “actually plateau redness is really not as beautiful as imagined, it is a type of plateau illness.” Similarly, in 2013 Xinhua ran a piece entitled “Tibetans Hope to Get Rid of Red Cheeks” that discussed Tibetan women’s increasing sense of “irritation” with plateau redness and Lhasa’s bustling cosmetics market. Degyi, a cosmetics saleswoman in Lhasa, was quoted as saying “we used to bask in the sun for warmth and had no knowledge of the harm the exposure could do. Today, we have a better understanding of how to protect ourselves.”

A quick search on Chinese search engine Baidu turns up no end of articles and forum threads discussing how to get rid of plateau redness. The advertisement below for Victoria Plastic and Cosmetic Hospital in Lhasa offers a “plateau redness removal” service for 8,800 RMB.

Keeping the above in mind, let’s get back to the essay that’s prompting discussion here. The piece, titled “Tibetan Girls, We Are in the Process of Losing Tibetan Redness” exhorted Tibetan women to reconsider their redness as a symbol of national pride:

The plateau bestows upon us a superior physicality, stronger lungs and heart, and a bright red face. These natural gifts leave us with nothing to feel embarrassed about. Within this information explosion that characterizes our present, so much is demanded, particularly of women. From being a perfect 50kg to the endless whitening brainwashing, we feel completely as though we ourselves are imperfect and are in need to change. In fact, there really is no need to live by the expectations of others.

Keeping a natural heart, and a natural appearance is also a manifestation of beauty.

On the Wechat platform where it was originally posted, it quickly generated discussion, garnered thousands of views, and was shared around the Tibetan blogosphere. The piece resonated with many women: Several posted comments expressing their agreement and praise. One comment praised the piece for allowing Tibetan women to “accept and even like our plateau redness. You wrote so well!” Another read “many people ask me why there is no plateau redness upon my face. I can only remain silent.”

Others, however, were critical of what they saw as an implicit suggestion in the piece that those without plateau redness were somehow less Tibetan. As one commenter remarked, “So only if you have plateau redness do you count as Tibetan?” Others joined in, arguing that this attempt to make plateau redness a compulsory feature of Tibetan women simply constituted another “a form of social violence.” Some were also irked by the burdens and limitations the piece placed on Tibetan women’s personal freedoms. One commenter wrote, “whether people decide to wear makeup or whiten their skin is really a matter of personal choice and determination, and we should not talk about it on the level of ethnicity.” Similarly, another commenter responded:

I am a Tibetan who was born and brought up in Tibet, but since I was a kid I have never had any kind of plateau redness. If outsiders think that people who live on the plateau must have plateau redness, that just tells you that they’re too narrow-minded.

While the essay certainly stirred up debate around questions of identity and authenticity, others were much more concerned about thinking about the reasons behind the disappearance of plateau redness.

Upon the plateau redness that exists on our face, we smear stuff, taking Han whiteness as beauty. We hardly realize that doing things like this, in this society of counterfeits, will harm our very own original skin and original form, and this is what is making plateau redness disappear…

Perhaps the most divisive point of the discussion was the degree to which Tibetans felt the loss of plateau redness was of their own making. Many argued that the disappearance of plateau redness goes far beyond being simply a matter of beauty trends and tastes. As one commenter wrote, “one of the main reasons plateau redness is disappearing has to do with the natural environment, rather than personal choice”; others wrote that “plateau redness follows the trends of changes in the environment and climate, and disappears” and that “I think Lhasa’s weather is less and less that of before, climate change should really be an influence in this.”

Others identifed an interrelated third factor, namely China’s inland schooling programs for Tibetans (xizang ban). Since 1985, as part of its “intellectual aid scheme” (zhili yuanzang), the Chinese government has been sending large numbers of Tibetan primary school graduates to inland secondary schools outside Tibetan regions. The cultural impact of inland schooling continues to be a very contentious subject of discussion among Tibetan netizens, and was also reflected in the comments on the loss of plateau redness.

Nowadays from a very young age many young Tibetans study in interior China and then their plateau redness slowly disappears. Also, before our diet was mainly tsampa but these days it’s basically rice and so on. These are just external changes, but the saddest part is that many have already begun forgetting their language and faith.

Because “plateau redness” will follow climatic and environmental change and transformation, and disappear. Following the upsurge in inland schooling classes so many students from the plateau study in interior China from a very young age. Once they go, that’s four years. They initially take their plateau redness with them to interior China and when they return to the plateau it has disappeared, and their skin has become white.

While the majority acknowledged the role that climate change, education, mainstream beauty standards, etc. play in the loss of plateau redness, not everyone viewed this as necessarily a negative development. As one commenter argued, the development of new beauty standards constitutes a sign of Tibetan development, openness, and greater integration in the world:

Pursuing what is fashionable does not mean not having a deep love for one’s own ethnicity. We are in the process of integrating into modern society, and this demonstrates our openness but we cannot lose our essential things. We study English, Mandarin, wear modern clothes, but this does not represent a lack of ethnic identification. This is the process of Tibetans moving towards the world.

Yet, there were plenty of others who took a far less rosy view of the situation:

The times are changing. Some things, we really haven’t intended to change but they change anyway. Just like some traditions that have already disappeared without a trace. If you want someone or something to blame, blame this nasty era.

To others, no matter the status of plateau redness, whether in the process of disappearing or not, “the blood that flows in our veins will never change.” Or, as another poster asked, “as long as there is a grain of love for Tibetans in your heart what does outwards appearance matter?”

Meanwhile, while Tibetans debated over the many fraught issues of identity, climate change, and inland schooling, plateau redness was being mobilized elsewhere in a fashion shoot the photographer dubbed “Nomads in the City.” The photography collection featured two Han Chinese female models ostensibly posing as Tibetan nomads on a stroll around the high streets of one of China’s sprawling urban centers (looks like Chengdu to me). I found the following spiel on the photographer’s Weibo page about what the photo collection is supposed to represent:

From today’s perspectives, the nomadic lifestyle is pretty bohemian. They are of no fixed abode, they take their tent this way and that, settling wherever there is water and grass. They have no home. Wherever they pitch their tent is home, not unlike gypsies. This life of unrestrained freedom remains the fantasy of so many modern urbanites who perhaps walk and walk, not knowing where they will pick up a girl of their liking.

A bizarre pantomime mimicry of Tibetan attire and clownish attempt at plateau redness, the photos were eventually picked up by Taobao, a Chinese shopping site, and used to promote “Gegu Heavenly,” a new online store inspired by “ethnic culture” and specializing in necklaces, bracelets, earrings, antiques, and other ornaments. Gegu Heavenly has certainly been working hard to market their products by leveraging the many tired stereotypes of Tibetan nomads as wild, mysterious, exotic, romantic, and unrestrained bodies. Mobilizing an amplified plateau redness must have been considered as lending their brand an heightened charm of je n’ai sais quoi. Tibetans, however, were left cold; the few comments I read had little more to say than that the representations of urban nomads were a “complete sham” and “terribly ugly.”

Not that it’s only Chinese media that romanticizes plateau redness. As the woman who wrote the original essay points out, tourists come to Tibet expecting to see this mark of “true” Tibetan life, and are disappointed by what they don’t find: “[T]hey see the great Potala Palace that they have longed to see and snap shots of devout pilgrims to Jokhang Temple they have longed to snap, but they rarely see the ‘plateau redness’ of Tibetan girls. They suddenly see the difference between the Tibet they have learned about from propaganda and that of reality.”

Like so much of the socio-cultural landscape in contemporary Tibet, the politics of plateau redness are deeply embedded in wider ongoing debates concerning identity, cultural assimilation, migration, education, climate change, and so on. “Tibetan Girls, We are in the Process Losing Tibetan Redness” and the many comments it generated reflect so many of internal dilemmas and conflicts experienced by Tibetans living in the shadows of the dominant Han culture and state. Yet unlike so many debates and discussions of this kind, the politics of plateau redness was dominated by Tibetan women. Across state media and the essay comments I saw no references to Tibetan men’s relationship to plateau redness. Does plateau redness not concern Tibetan men? Where is the male gaze in all this? I briefly posed the question to the woman who penned the essay I translated. She responded that it was something she had not considered when writing the piece, but suspected the issue would resonate with many men.

In many colonial and postcolonial contexts, the struggle for cultural preservation, recognition, and respect is often a notably gendered phenomenon. Not merely the biological reproducers of the nation, women are also seen as cultural reproducers. Exploring the intersection of gender and nationalism, scholar Nira Yuval-Davis writes, “Women are often constructed as the cultural symbols of the collectivity, of its boundaries, as carriers of the collectivity’s ‘honour’ and its intergenerational reproducers of culture” (Gender and Nation, 1997). From India to Ireland, situating women's bodies at the center of the struggle against colonialization has been and continues to be a very common motif, and the plateau redness debates suggest a similar narrative at work among Tibetans. Caught between pressures to conform to Han and Tibetan beauty ideals, both Tibetan women and plateau redness stand on precarious ground.

A quick dip into the history of hair-drying, pre-blow-dryers: My blow dryer stopped working a few weeks ago. I usually air-dry anyway, except for the front part, which I blow-dry because it's tricky to get it to air-dry just so. But in dawdling to replace my dryer—a process that will likely take at least six more weeks, because I'm lazy about the stupidest things—it got me thinking about how people might've tried to commodify hair before blow-dryers were around. (The first actual blow-dryer was invented the year before, though the device wasn't really wieldy for home use until the 1970s.)

There was Parrish's design, above, as well as Anna Kellogg's design, also patented in 1899, both of which worked by lifting the hair off the back, which allowed for more air circulation and also protected clothes:

U.S. Patent US649608 A, filed 1899

Then there were the comb-dryer hybrids—which is pretty much how I air-dry my hair now, running a brush through it periodically as it dries in order to keep it from drying too...I dunno, stiffly? The ends just don't look right if I don't brush it as it dries.

U.S. Patent US701673 A, filed 1901

U.S. Patent US697743 A, filed 1900

It's hard to tell if any of these particular models made it to market, but it's interesting to see how patents from that era are still cited in more modern patents—shampooing aids for bed-bound people, stowaway shelves, and my favorite, a template patented in 1974 for cutting long hair.

For my last haircut, I went to a fancier place than usual, a sleek joint where they bring you herbal tea. The reason for my upgrade was that I wanted to look more professional. Except for my decade of short hair, I’ve had exactly the same haircut since ninth grade: long, gentle layers, some tapering to frame the face, never bangs. It’s a fine, low-maintenance haircut that suits me, but as I approach age 40 I wanted something a little less collegiate. Professional was the exact word I used to the stylist. He proceeded to ask the most logical question possible in this scenario: What is your profession?In other words: What on earth do you mean by wanting to look professional?

The thing is, I hadn’t taken it further than the word in my mind. I didn’t know how I wanted to look more professional, or how looking professional would translate to my hair. Better? Yes, but in a particular way. More polished somehow, more finished. I kept using these words to tell him what I wanted—polished, finished, professional—and we came up with the cut I wanted. During the cut itself, our small talk deepened, and I told him about my upcoming book. When I mentioned that there was a chapter on the language of beauty—“on the words we use to describe how we look”—he stopped me. "You said you wanted to look professional, and I had no idea what that meant. One person’s professional isn’t going to be another person’s—did you want to look like a news anchor? a stockbroker? a photographer? What does professional mean?"

His questions stuck with me. What I meant by professional was actually polished, something a little more “done” than my usual preferred style. But even that: What does polished mean? That I wanted to look like I spend time styling my hair? Indeed, that might well be it: I’ve stayed freelance for most of my career in part because I love the freedom of being able to work wearing whatever I want, styled only if I choose, a luxury I didn’t have when I had an office job. But I got a fancier cut in an effort to look more like an Author—whatever that might mean—the idea being that if I look less like someone who churns out blog posts crammed in coffeeshop corners and more like someone who writes from a proper office (even if that office is from home, which it is), it might translate into people taking the book just that much more seriously. Looking professional meant, in my head, looking like I didn't have to scramble as hard as I actually do. Looking professional meant looking less like a writer and editor who lives entirely off the “gig economy,” and more like someone with the luxury to style my hair every morning.

Looking professional means sending a set of signals that amount to looking like one belongs in the professional class: not laborers, but people who can buy expensive styling creams, get frequent trims, and spend time and money to do things like minimize frizz. It means looking like you require the labor of other people to begin with(it all begins with a good cut, right?), and then requires our own unpaid labor to maintain. Looking professional revolves around labor.

I’m reading The Future We Want: Radical Ideas for the New Century, an essay collection from millennial radicals and socialists that serves as a sort of manifesto for an alternative future that would actually serve young Americans, and the rest of us too. My ideology is far too muddled for me to convincingly call myself a socialist (and don’t mistake this post for me feeling the Bern; I feel it just fine, but Hillary 4-eva), but in reading the book, I kept coming back to this: I had assumed that a good haircut would help me look more professional, which, under the rubric I'd lined up, is a good thing. But I'd assumed it was a good thing because we're living under capitalist strictures that assume being a member of the professional class is a goal for the working class. Looking professional would help others see me as a good producer: as someone who knows that spending her time in the production of goods—”creative” goods, sure, but goods nonetheless—is what forms her value in society.

I often mention in an almost offhanded way how beauty is presumed to be so much of a woman’s worth in society, which it is. Looking professional isn’t necessarily about being beautiful per se; it’s a set of signals that can be created or purchased by anyone. It appears to democratize beauty, or at least one form of beauty. But this particular form of self-presentation gets to the root of what socialists might finger as the beauty problem: As long as we tie a woman's looks to her worth, beauty is a good, not a concept, and as long as we live under capitalism, beauty will not be something that can be fully enjoyed or used directly by its creators. As long as we treat beauty as a good, women are not going to be able to enjoy it as fully as we might otherwise—as a place of joy and pleasure. We still do that, for sure. But if you squint, you can see a world where the value part of the beauty equation is removed. And isn’t that lovely?

I’m wondering what other people envision when they think of a “professional” look, for women and men. I’m still picturing a 1980s-style vibe: men in suits, women with helmet hair and shoulder pads, even as I wanted neither helmet hair nor shoulder pads for my own “professional” look. What does professional mean to you when applied to a look? And how does that compare with how you view your profession, or the idea of yourself as a worker or laborer?

A highly productive bonne vivante, Lisa Ferber has shown her paintings and illustrations at National Arts Club, the Painting Center, and Village West gallery. She's also the creator, writer, and star of the feature film The Sisters Plotz(directed by Lisa Hammer, and starring Eve Plumb, Lisa Ferber and Lisa Hammer), which debuted at New York City's Anthology Film Archives in 2015, and launched as a Top Five Most-Watched video on FunnyorDie.com. Words like whimsy and satire are frequently applied to her work—but it’s her enchantment with beauty, expressed through vibrant color and markings of high glamour, that made me want to interview her. A featured speaker at New York University on independent arts marketing, her keen awareness of image extends beyond canvas and stage to her signature colorful wardrobe and polished presentation. We talked about makeup as a symbol of humility, the glamour of the absurd, and beauty as a marketing tool. In her own words:

Photo: Meryl Tihanyi

On Apologies

There are ways people have to deal with physical beauty that they don’t have to with other assets. Beautiful people are supposed to act as though they don’t know they’re beautiful, even if it’s kind of a fact. Somebody might say, “I’m good at math” and not apologize for it, but for a woman to say, “Yeah, you know, I’m really pretty”—nobody does that. It’s weird that people are modest about being beautiful because it’s sort of an accident. But it can be a way of stepping away from being threatening, since beautiful women are seen as threats. I remember complimenting this woman who was working on a show with my then-boyfriend. I said she was really pretty and she said, “It’s amazing what a good lipstick and a great dress can do.” It made me like her more because I felt she was saying, “I know I’m in a show with your boyfriend, but I am not a threat to you.” I felt she understood that sometimes women can be insecure about having a pretty woman around their guy, and that she could handle that with humility and manners without insulting herself.

Part of it is the social power women wield with beauty. When we say, “Oh, that woman is so beautiful,” we give her power and mystery. Beauty simultaneously gains someone social respect and people’s suspicion. Are there certain types of beauty that don’t incur the wrath of other women? Or certain levels of beauty? If you work with someone who has that California-girl kind of beauty, everyone is going to want to think she’s dumb, because she’s pretty in that certain type of way. Whereas I think women are into someone like Angelina Jolie because she’s freaky-looking but also really beautiful.

I think people believe they’re supposed to apologize for beauty because it’s genetic. Nobody’s allowed to show that they know it, yet most of us are also raised to present ourselves confidently. If you don’t groom yourself and make the effort, it looks as if you don’t care—or even that you’re conceited. I go through phases of not wearing makeup, and someone said to me once, “I noticed you don’t wear any makeup—how come?” I remember thinking, Why do I need to explain this? Is she saying that I don’t have the right to think that I look good without it? Should I wear makeup just to show that I don’t think I’m okay without it?

I think as much as women are raised to believe in ourselves, we’re also taught that a woman who’s prettier or slimmer than the people around her will be hated—think of the whole idea of “You’re so skinny, I hate you!” That mind-set can prevent women from revealing their full bloom. It’s really only been in the past few years that I’ve been able to not just present myself comedically, in terms of the way I look. For many years I felt like my self-presentation had to have something ridiculous about it, sort of kooky—and sure, there’s always going to be an artsiness about my style. But for me to just put on a beautiful dress and feel comfortable looking elegant and serious and poised, and not have to have something ridiculous about it—I had to be ready to say, “I can handle this.”

Djuna’s Croissant Had Failed Her

On the Glamour and Humor of Her Work

People have always responded to my work as witty, both my writing and my visual art. Only recently have I thought: You know, I really love beauty. I want my visual work to be transportive—to be beautiful as well as witty. Wit has a glamour to it, which I hope comes through in my work. I also think absurdity is glamorous, if you think of glamour as something indulgent and transcendent. Glamour means there’s a sense of mystery that makes you want to get closer, but you suspect that you can’t. So I put my women in makeup and necklaces—I’m not going to draw schlubs! But for somebody who loves beauty so much, I’m not painting a picture of the prettiest girl in the room. People tell me that I create characters, almost like pop art or illustrative art—they’re not supposed to look like people we know. But something can be beautiful even if it’s not realistic. I want that feeling of “Aaah” that comes because something is gorgeous, with beautiful colors.

When I’ve gone through tough times in life, the things that help me survive are beauty and humor, and it bothers me when people try to make them separate. Beauty and humor are both transportive—they’re magical. When I was growing up two of the women I admired were Lucille Ball and Gilda Radner, because they were pretty and funny. And one of my current heroines is Fran Drescher. She created a hilarious show and strutted around that set without apologizing for being beautiful, funny, and powerful. I think that women in comedy often make themselves less pretty because they’re taught they have to choose between pretty and funny. But I don’t want to have to choose one or the other in the way I present myself as a woman, or in my artwork. I want my viewer to enjoy two of my favorite things: beauty and humor.

Lady Ferber Gave Her Sommelier the Afternoon Off

On the Myth of the Underdog

We give ourselves credit for thinking someone who’s jolie-laide is cool-looking because she’s not conventional. But when you look at these women, it’s not as though they’re ugly—when Anjelica Huston walks into a room, everyone notices her. It’s like sometimes we’re taught to hate conventionally pretty things because we’re more feminist if we think weird-looking people are pretty—but those people are still pretty. I mean, Christie Brinkley is super-duper pretty. She’s the definition of pretty. But it’s not cool to say so because she’s conventional-looking. I love pretty! Pretty is great! I’m kind of on both sides of it. It upsets me that women are taught it’s imperative that they keep themselves looking attractive, but if somebody tells me I’m pretty, I think that’s nice of them. It annoys me when people think you have to choose one side.

Nobody relates to the pretty, popular character in a movie, even people who are pretty and popular. We’re always supposed to relate to the underdog. There’s this movie Boomerang, with Eddie Murphy—Robin Givens is the hot woman, and she’s evil, and Halle Berry is sort of the sporty underdog best friend. Halle Berry is the underdog! You’re supposed to relate to her, even though nobody can relate to Halle Berry! But the movie standards for beauty set us up, and maybe that’s for our ego—we get to feel like the underdog, but then we can think, “Wow, look at that underdog, she’s really beautiful.” And it’s because we’re convinced that we’re never the top thing. Certainly things like beauty contests don’t help. Beauty contests? That’s crazy!

I remember being an editorial assistant, and there was this other girl who worked there. I started to pick up on this vibe that she resented me somehow. I didn’t know if I was imagining things so I talked to a friend who had worked there for a while. He said, “Well, before you came, she was the only attractive young editorial assistant.” I hadn’t taken away anything from her—we were both young, pleasant women, but there’s this idea that there can only be one woman who occupies that space at any given time, and it becomes a part of our mentality. Take the idea of the 50 most beautiful people in the world—why should there be a competition? Men don’t think this way, and women don’t think this way about men. Women might compete for men, but the emphasis is on competing with one other, not on competing for him.

The Sisters Plotz premiere, 2015 (photo: Lisa Lambert)

On Beauty as a Marketing Tool

I think beauty is a fantastic marketing tool. By being beautiful, a person is saying that she has the things associated with beauty: health, wealth, success, all these things that we value. When you hear, “Oh, I ran into so-and-so, and she looked like hell,” boom—she’s leading an unhappy life. But when it’s “...and she looked great”—now, what that could mean is that she’s had a ton of Botox and has a personal trainer and is miserable. A beautiful woman can be miserable like anyone else. But we think she’s doing well.

Whenever we hear about the beautiful but tortured woman, we don’t really believe it, which is why we love it. We still think she’s cool in some way. The Jared Leto character on My So-Called Life was considered a heartthrob because he was beautiful and tortured. If he hadn’t been beautiful but was still tortured, his character would have just been some random guy, but to have a coating of beauty over an implied pain is perceived as intriguing.

As a visual artist, I am constantly expressing myself, so when I leave the house I’m going to be together. I’m going to have my lovely necklace, my lipstick, my pretty dress. There probably are industries where you have to play down any ornamentation in order to market yourself properly—but actually, when I’m presenting myself as a writer I try to be more glamorous. When you’re a writer people assume that you’re smart, and I don’t want to be seen as, Oh, she has brains, so she doesn’t have a body. I’m a body person as well as a mind person. When you’re a visual artist nobody necessarily assumes that you’re smart. So when an artist has something about them as a person that makes people want to keep looking at them, we’re intrigued by that and then want to know the artist’s work—which is part of marketing. Really, beauty is marketing: That’s the whole point, that you see somebody and they’re beautiful and you think, I want to get to know you. People are going to want to talk to a beautiful woman. Women are going to admire her, and men are going to want her, and she just seems happy and healthy and like she’s doing well. That’s what draws people in.

This works in other professions too: When I’m working in any job, I like to be valued as a part of the team, and part of it is showing up well-groomed, in nice colors, and just contributing to the overall atmosphere. I sang in choir when I was in Hebrew school—I wasn’t thinking about how my particular voice sounded, I just wanted to contribute to the beauty of the overall sound. It’s like that with my art, and my style. I want to be a pretty part of the world.

Here’s a party whose caucus I’d love to watch: The Men’s Dress Reform Party. While researching the history of men and makeup, I ran across a mention of this odd-duck British party in the 1930s whose sole purpose was to agitate for loosened clothing restrictions on men. They paraded about in shorts, open-collared shirts, and color-coordinated socks; if a member wore a tie, he might fasten it inches below his Adam’s apple.

The idea was that the dark, heavy clothes men were expected to wear were unhygienic (it was difficult to wash a suit before widely available dry cleaning—indeed, that’s part of why suits are traditionally dark, to mask dirt), and ugly to boot (we’ll get to that). Men’s clothing was a health hazard, they claimed, which fell into line with its parent organization, The New Health Society, a group devoted to educating people about nutrition, “intestinal stasis,” and “helio-hygiene.” (I visualize them as a predecessor to Gwyneth’s Goop team.) So they fought back, urging employers to let workers wear freer dress, organizing ersatz holidays in which men were to wear whatever they pleased, and throwing rallies at which members were instructed to “Come as you are and feel your best,” which for some meant togas, for others singlets and jeans, and for H.G. Wells, meant “ordinary evening dress.”

Western Argus, Kalgoorlie, Australia, July 14, 1931

It seems odd at first that this would be an organized group instead of a looser assemblage, but its goals were political. They’d seen how women had begun to fling off repressive roles, a movement reflected in their clothes; why not do the same for masculinity? J.C. Flügel, an influential psychologist at the time and a proud MDRP member, claimed that the institutionalization of the suit had led to a “a remarkable repression of Narcissism among men,” which he saw as undesirable, as it left all the fun of self-ornamentation to women. Unleashing men’s sartorial fancy, he argued, would loosen their superego, the restrictive, repressive force in the human psyche—which would ultimately lead to greater freedom.

What’s interesting about the MDRP is its split between a vision that even today seems progressive (a lessened emphasis on traditional masculinity) and a cause that seems abhorrent. Part of the MDRP’s cause revolved around eugenics: If the “right” men were to showcase their appearance, they would be more attractive to the “right” women, and more “right” babies (that is, white babies born into the professional class) would be created. Eugenics was widely accepted in mainstream science and medicine then, but even contextualized, it’s clearly troublesome for all sorts of reasons, with fascism topping the list. Yet even within this odious framework, I appreciate their commitment to at least thinking through the evolutionary logistics. Evolution is often cited as a reason women wear makeup: It’s ornamentation that catches the eye of potential mates. It’s a perfectly fine theory until you question why it’s women, and not men, who wear makeup (for the most part), when both sexes have an evolutionary need to attract the other. So the MDRP’s eugenics mission was wrongheaded, but at least it bothered to be consistent with its own internal logic and wasn’t just cherry-picking its theories to justify a sexist vision.

Eugenics is tied to class, not just race, and the MDRP has an interesting fabric here too. The party claimed to be for people of all classes, but the fact was that most of its members were middle- and upper-class, and that they weren’t advocating for more accessible clothes, but more fashionable ones. (In fact, clothes were about to become way more accessible, with the invention of fabrics that invited ready-to-wear clothes—which actually wound up accomplishing the MDRP’s goals, even though they had nothing to do with it.) But the MDRP’s biggest reinforcement of class is something that’s familiar today. The suit that the MDRP was fighting against was the very thing their grandfathers had fought for: a uniform of sorts that would theoretically allow for meritocracy to flourish, since it was more difficult to display wealth through the suit as opposed to the ruffles of the aristocracy. The ruffles were seen as oppressive; eventually, the suit that replaced it became seen as the same.

Today it would look like the MDRP’s vision has won out, at least in America (though remember, the MDRP was British) with leisurewear accepted in plenty of professional workplaces and shorts no longer seen as the province of little boys. But the suit remains, and it remains as a symbol of class. Most of the time I see a man in a suit, he’s either in the upper echelons of certain professional worlds (financiers, government officials), or he’s in a position of servitude (security, hospitality). By agitating for the loss of the suit, the Men’s Dress Reform Party wanted to revert to the days of male self-ornamentation as a display of cultural capital. The suit remains, albeit changed—and changed in a way that has shifted its meaning to be about a display of, not an eradication of, cultural capital. In that way, regardless of the MDRP’s place as a mere footnote in history, they were unexpectedly successful.

When I first heard about eyelash extensions, I threw it into the bin of Things I Would Never Do, along with Vajazzling and placenta facials. But when it came time to take my author photo—which will probably serve as the definitive photo of me, Internetwise, for quite possibly the rest of my life—laying on my back for an hour and a half to have my eyelashes individually extended seemed utterly reasonable. I wanted to look my best, but still wanted to look like me; emphasizing my eyes without wearing more dramatic makeup than I’d normally wear seemed like a good way to do that. It got me thinking about eyelashes—before getting eyelash extensions, I didn’t understand their importance. I don’t know how many surveys I’ve read that say that the number-one must-wear cosmetic women cite as essential is mascara. There was something there, and there has been for centuries.

Latisse isn't the first eyelash-growth treatment out there. A partial list of treatments used throughout history to amp up eyelash growth: white wine, mint, lavender vinegar, glycerine, “fluid extract of jaborandi” (an herb that is now used to make prescription glaucoma medicine), red vaseline, a mixture of cornflower and chervil, quinine, almond oil, kohl (personally recommended by the prophet Mohammed), Spanish fly, and myrtle extract, most of which may be applied to the lashes with “a tiny camel’s-hair paint-brush.”

Nor are false eyelashes themselves particularly new. In 1911, an Ottawa woman filed the first patent for false eyelashes, which don’t look all that different from any strip of false eyelashes you might buy at a drugstore. (Her invention was cited in a toupee patent 43 years later, as well as numerous fake eyelash patents, so she was onto something.) D.W. Griffith is often credited with creating them in 1916, but while he did order a wigmaker to improvise a set of them while filming Intolerance, he wasn’t the first. Either way, the patent was decidedly less dramatic than the process described in a British newspaper in 1899, in which the eyelid was rubbed with cocaine, then threaded through with the client’s own hair.

People used to trim their eyelashes. The (erroneous) idea is from the same school of thought that sees parents shaving the heads of their daughters in an effort to make the hair grow back thicker and fuller. It doesn’t work that way, but magazines from the 1890s advise that lashes be “clipped with the scissors once in every five or six weeks, which is all the treatment they require to make them long and curved” (Current Literature: A Magazine of Contemporary Record, 1896). Not that people needed the advice, for “every mother knows that she has only to clip her baby’s eyelashes while it sleeps, and continue the process during its childhood, to render them as long and luxuriant as Circassian’s” (Ballou's Monthly Magazine, 1872). Other sources recommend eyelash trims, but for hygienic reasons; apparently 120 years ago people were getting all sorts of things wrapped up in their eyelashes. (Incidentally, this actually does happen with eyelash extensions. My lashes have been collecting detritus for weeks.)

We've been darkening our eyelashes for a while. You already know about ancient Egyptians and kohl, I’m guessing, which was used not just to rim the eyes but to tint their fringe. Women in parts of Asia used elderberry juice to color their lashes, as well as ashes from cork or incense. In Europe, India ink, gum arabic, and rosewater was recommended for a black hue; light-haired women were steered toward a mixture of red wine, salt, iron sulphate, a mass of oak chemically distorted by a wash, and French brandy. Basically, anything dark would do—frankincense, resin, plain old soot, mixed with something to make it stick. Once petroleum jelly came along, women started using it to give the appearance of thicker, glossier lashes, but the first commercial mascaras didn’t come about until the 1860s, with Maybelline mascara—a mixture of coal and petroleum jelly, and the first mascara in the States—being developed in 1913.

Like every other aspect of beauty, the quest for luxuriant lashes tells a deeper story. Because human history has such a rich history of attempting to lengthen and darken the lashes, it’s tempting to say that eyelashes are one of those things that has been valued for their beauty regardless of time or place. That’s not quite true, though: In medieval and early Renaissance Europe, lashes were considered unimportant, even ugly—they detracted from the forehead, that most beautiful of features (or so said the mores of the time). Women removed their lashes and brows to give the forehead its full due.

Still, luxe lashes aren’t a new invention of the beauty industry—women and men have indeed been thickening and darkening theirs since antiquity. But one period in particular stands out here. Many of the odd potions I’ve listed above—chervil for growth, red wine for color—were concocted in late 19th century Europe. Two other crazes were sweeping Europe at the same time: Orientalism, and physiognomy. Europeans became fascinated with the East, “othering” Asian society and rendering cultural practices impossibly exotic, the people full of mystery and secrets. The beauty rites of the East (including the “near East,” or the Caucauses, hence the mention of the eyelash trimming of the Carcassians) were a perfect example of this “mystery.” It intersected perfectly with physiognomy, the pseudoscience of reading people’s personalities through their faces. The “best-developed” fringe belonged to “the aesthetic and artistic classes”; long lashes could indicate shyness and timidity, or secretiveness, indicating that “their owner is too shy or too timid to be perfectly frank and outspoken.” Short lashes were for blunt, rude folks. They’re also “effective agents in love-making and coquetry,” which circles back to Orientalism. Women of the East were (and still are) seen as having an exotic sexuality; borrowing their eyelash hygiene was a way women of the West could borrow that appeal.

Eyelashes were particularly well-suited to physiognomy’s claims. Regardless of whether long lashes actually indicate a demure or coquettish demeanor, the fact is that if someone is peering at you through a thick fringe, you feel a sense of secretiveness: There’s a barrier there, one that separates eyes, those famous truth-tellers, from others who might discern how much truth is actually being told.

All this is to say: I don’t regret getting eyelash extensions, even as the process of getting them made me feel incredibly high-maintenance. Which is appropriate: They are high-maintenance, quite literally, in that they do require maintenance. You can’t use oil-based makeup remover; you can’t let water stream down your face; you can’t sleep on your side (my solution here was to just sleep with my head on the pillow but my face off of it). No rubbing, no tugging, and you have to separate them every day with a mascara-less mascara wand, or else they’ll get all tangled up. (Finding a down feather wound between my false eyelashes from my pillow is probably my lifetime height of Luxury Problems—indeed, perhaps my lifetime height of luxury.)

I can’t say I’ll shell out for them again; I think of myself as far too practical to do so for any reason other than having a public photo taken. But I have an easy justification in case I do decide to re-up: Eyelash extensions, in some ways, are practical. I found myself not “needing” eye makeup on most days, only wearing it to punch things up a bit. Normally I wear eyeliner and mascara every day, largely because it makes me look more like I look in my mind’s eye. But it’s not like my mind’s eye sees myself wearing eyeliner; it sees me with my eyes more emphasized, more prominent in my facial composition than they actually are. Eyelash extensions did that. (It’s also difficult to apply eyeliner when you’re working around these 9-millimeter spider legs.) Even with the maintenance, it actually saved me time in the morning, this “natural” emphasis made possible by a completely fake creation. It didn’t save me money—eyelash extensions run a little more than $100 and last around a month—but for a short-term proposition it was worth it, and if I had more disposable income I might consider getting them more regularly. Barring that, I’ll just rub my eyelids with cocaine, thread a needle with my own hair, and hope for the best.